SWISS GAME DESIGN ARCHIVE 1968-2000

Back

A

GAME

1988
/
1st
/
Amiga
Arkanoid

Crack

Crack is a Breakout/Arkanoid style game with a prehistoric setting, released for the Amiga in 1988. It was developed and published by Linel.
br> The player's paddle looks like a bone and the ball is a spherical stone, adding to the prehistoric setting. The level backgrounds show scenes with different types of dinosaurs, designed by Roland Petermann.

The bricks sometimes contain pick-ups such as a laser gun, an automatic CPU-controlled bat navigation mode, extra lives or a slow ball, among other helpful abilities. A pickup is activated immediately after being picked up, unless one is already active. The player can discard the current ability and switch to the newly acquired one by right-clicking their mouse.

Crack also features a mini-game — the Coconut Game — which can be activated in the main menu, after which it can be played at predetermined intervals between the Breakout-style levels. The aim is to collect as many coconuts as possible by maneuvering the caveman Herbie Stone to the left or right. The collected coconuts add to the overall score of the main game.

Crack has a single-player mode and a multiplayer mode. The game also includes an extensive level editor and supports both mouse and joystick controls.

Herbie Stone is the mascot of another Linel game called Dugger. In both games, Herbie Stone is the star of the humorous intro sequence and is even featured in short comics that were printed in the games' manuals.

Crack was the first game of a planned series of three games with a prehistoric theme around the character Herbie Stone. Dugger was the second game, published later in 1988. The third game, with the working title Dugger 2, was never finished. The game was sold via distributor Logico Software of Lausanne. The game's box art was created by Herman Serrano. The booklet featured a comic by Karl Bihlmeier, a German cartoonist from Cologne who later got reasonably famous with his “Hermann, der User” Computer cartoons, which were published in Amiga magazines and many other publications. The colorful in-game graphics of prehistoric Herbie Stone were developed by Roland Petermann.

Reviewers at the time were smitten by the animated intro with Herbie Stone and his two caveman friends hammering the game’s title into a rock.